412 becoming more human by becoming more godlike
between our ordinary structure- preserving activities and our excep-
tional structure- preserving moves. In so doing, it enables us to engage
wholeheartedly in a form of life without surrendering to it, thus allow-
ing us to live out more fully the truth of the relation between spirit and
structure.
A similar change takes place in the practice of thought when normal
science begins to acquire attributes of revolutionary science. Th e dis-
course of a par tic u lar discipline starts to consider its own presupposi-
tions. It accelerates the dialectic, characteristic of the history of thought,
between change of content and change of method. No longer do we
need to await rare “paradigm shift s.” Th ey occur piecemeal, in the midst
of ordinary attempts to advance our knowledge of the world. Th e power
to generate them ceases to be reserved to a small number of geniuses; it
is diff used more widely within the human race.
Such a change in the quality rather than in the substance of an in-
stitutional order or of a fi eld of thought amounts to a special case of a
more general mode of experience. Not only do we make repetition
serve innovation; we also change how repetition works. We reshape its
workings so that it leads more readily beyond itself. What such a re-
shaping means for the conduct of life is a topic to be considered at the
next step of this argument. For the moment, it suffi ces to say that it re-
quires the formation of a character (if character is to the person what
the institutional and ideological order is to society and what a compre-
hensive theory or paradigm is to science) that uses repetition against
repetition and habit (even virtuous habit) against habit, to the end of
enabling us to possess life more fully in the present.
A third principle holds that an intimate relation, of both reciprocal
dependence and partial substitution, exists between our collective ad-
vance toward this ideal in politics and in thought and our progress to-
ward it in the way we live. In a society and a culture the institutional
and cognitive structures of which have changed in the direction de-
scribed, to lighten the burden of repetition and to enlist it in the ser vice
of the unique and the novel, it will be correspondingly easier for the
individual to resist surrendering personality to character and circum-
stance. Th e collective achievement will facilitate the liberation of the
individual and intensify the experience of life. Th ere will be less of a
distance to travel in re orienting existence.